ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the rural–urban gap in adult height during the first phases of modern economic growth in Spain and explores the emergence of an urban height penalty with the spread of industrialisation. Its objective is to analyse the impact of the socio-economic changes driven by liberalism on biological standards of living in the cities and the countryside from the mid-nineteenth century. With new height data, it seeks to determine whether human height grew or decreased in the early phases of industrialisation and after the liberal agrarian reforms. The principal data sources are the male heights drawn from the military recruitment records between 1857 and 1936, which provide information about the health and net nutrition of the cohorts between 1836 and 1915. Most of the studies reveal a height penalty in rural areas, which were more backwards than the city. However, height deteriorated in some industrialised cities due to the unhealthy environments of the factories and workshops, overcrowding and the lack of hygiene in the homes, the high incidence of child labour and the high prevalence of contagious infections. However, the height penalty was episodic in the urban environment and much less frequent than in the rural world. New data from different studies show that in some rural environments there was a better nutritional status than in the urban-industrial centres. The rural–urban gap was wider than we believed, due to environmental and institutional factors. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the cities overtook the countryside due to the spread of sewage systems and the provision of health institutions and care facilities. We suggest the expansion of the research on the height penalty or premium based on analyses in terms of social class, professions and socio-economic status.
